100 Colour shawl

This is the biggest thing I've ever crocheted, and the biggest number of colours I've used for a crochet project too! I discovered this new Dutch brand of crochet yarn - Yarn and Colors, Must-Have-Minis - and I fell in love with all the colours - yes even the pink! I knew I had to do something with all the colours but I didn't know what so I started collecting the mini balls of yarn anyway knowing that I'd think of something eventually.
It wasn't till the second order of them arrived, and it included 2 balls of colour #18 even though I'd only ordered the one that I dared try and see how far I could get with a single mini ball of this yarn. I had called the shop that had sent the order to talk about sending it back but they were wonderful and said I could keep it! The shop in question is Wol Plein for the curious - I've been a happy customer there for a while now and this was the first time something went "wrong".

I decided to do a granny square and found that although I could do 6 whole rounds I couldn't manage a 7th, however the yarn not used for the 7th round was enough to do a 2 round granny square as well so from each colour I made a 6 and a 2 round granny square before moving onto the next colour.

I had discovered that there was a method to join as you go on YouTube so I went ahead and tried this out after organising a large ball of black yarn of the same range. It took a few goes to not panic that it was misaligned as it does look as if it will be, but it works nicely and is certainly easier than slip stitching them together.

I started this in the middle of November and finished it last week - it's been one hell of a journey and I don't think I want to take on such a big crochet project again as it almost did me in, the last 1/3 took as long as the first 2/3 just because I had enough of crochet and wanted to cross stitch again, but I didn't dare to stop as I knew that it would probably end up on the big UFO pile, like so many other projects. So I stuck with it and finally managed to finish the joining of the squares. I was planning on using the mini granny squares on the border but unfortunately they were the wrong size to add in the same way as the rest and I found I preferred it as it was.

Once I'd decided that, I did 2 rounds of plain black double crochet (the US version, not the UK one) to make sure that the strain of use wouldn't pull the blocks apart or let them stretch as much. Despite the huge distance I had to crochet, this went really fast and I was done in 2 days flat.

If you want to make something similar you will need to make 99 blocks - 85 squares and 14 triangles. Since the granny square has patterns all over the place and I'm not good at crochet notations I'm going to let you Google how to make a granny square yourself, however I can give you the placement of the colours and amounts of yarn and needle used in case you feel in a moment of insanity that you wish to make one too. The triangles are done in the same way as a normal granny square except you do 4 stitches on the first and last stitch and only have the one normal corner in between (clear as mud right? Google triangle granny square and you will find what I mean)

I used:

• 99 x Must-Have-Minis ball of crochet cotton, one of each colour except for black 
• 7 balls of black Must-Have standard size however you might need an 8th depending on your tension
• A 3 mm crochet hook - that's a 00 in the US

Note: If you decide you'd prefer another colour for the joining together then by all means do so! It's YOUR shawl after all!

Working on the basis that I can get 1, 6 round granny square out of a 10 gr mini ball, it's safe to assume that you can get 5 out of a 50 gr full sized ball (possibly 6 but I'd not rely on it) so if you want to use less colours then you can go for the bigger balls of yarn and just get 20 full sized balls in a mix of colours you like, or just one colour instead of all the mini balls.

The best thing about this brand I have to say is that the colour is consistent across the dye lots! I had not got enough black initially as I'd not known how much I'd need so I ended up with balls from dye lot 1 and 2 but you can't tell the difference in the shawl, and I didn't look at the dye lots as I used them either.

If you do decide to make one like this do let me know! I'd love to hear about it!

Also: Not affiliated etc. just a happy user of the yarn :)